Lifestyle

Tour College Campuses Virtually With This Site

With 5,000 students at his Staten Island high school, Jordan Goldman said he didn't get much face-to-face time with one of the few college counselors on his campus. And it wasn't financially feasible for his family to take him to every university he was considering. Instead, at the start of his senior year he emailed hundreds of college students who attended the universities he was considering. He asked them about their experiences and told them to give his email address to friends who could offer additional advice. By the end of his senior year, Goldman amassed nearly 3,000 emails in his inbox from college students.

Goldman found a university to attend (Wesleyan University). He also pitched his student-sourced college search idea to Penguin books and it became a top selling college series called, Students Guide to College. After five annual editions of the successful series, Goldman decided to put all this college-search information online and create an interactive site to help high school students find a college to attend. Now, at age 30, Goldman is the founder and CEO of Unigo.com, which is short for "university go." The site has more than one million unique visitors each month.

From Unigo.com students can get virtual campus tours, and even schedule one-on-one live chat sessions with one of 15,000 current students. Prospective students on Unigo can search student tour guides by major, gender, race and a number of other factors so they can meet students who are similar to themselves.

This is a lot less expensive than traditional college tours where you have to spend money on fuel to drive there, book a hotel, pay for meals, etc.

Unlike traditional college tours that involve a student tour guide leading a group of 40 or so people through campus, virtual tour guides on Unigo are not affiliated with the school's outreach programs. While the virtual tours are way less costly than real-life tours, they're not free. On Unigo it costs $29 for 30 minutes with a current student, but Goldman said you're getting unfiltered advice. In the virtual tours, students can speak candidly about the school — bad or good, so long as they don't slander any person.

"For a four-year $400 thousand dollar decision, you want to talk to a consumer," he said.

Prospective students can also chat with a professional college counselor for $99 an hour. These are people who work at high schools as counselors or are a professionally certified college counselor. Since interviews with student and professional counselors are not free, Unigo offers a 15 minute free call with one of their representatives who will help you determine which counselor is the best fit for you.

The low ratio of counselors to students that Goldman had at his high school isn't rare — at high schools in California, there are on average one college counselor for every 850 students, spending less than 17 minutes per student per year. Families are left on their own to figure out what schools to focus on. And since there are 4,216 colleges in America, that's a lot of schools to search through.

Unigo's search functionality lets you create a search for schools based on size, price and admissions. The site also has more than 30,000 rankings of colleges from current students to help you narrow down your choices, plus free photos and video. Use the "my chances" section where you can see the liklihood of getting admitted to a particular school by entering your grades. The database uses 765,689 college applications to predict this.

Unigo is also useful for high school students who didn't get into the universities they toured in-person and need to quickly learn about their back-up schools.

The site also offers a course called "Absolute Admit" that takes high school students through every step of the application process with 250 interactive videos. The course costs $199, or $249 for the program with a counselor plus a 30 minute live chat with a current student.

There is a wealth of information online to help students narrow-down their list of colleges they want to attend.

Cappex offers a "What are my chances?" calculator that tells you how likely it is you'll get into your college of choice based on your grades. The site also offers college profiles and reviews for more than 3,000 schools. When you create a profile, you can find scholarships that match your needs.

Zinch focuses more on finding scholarships and offering SAT and ACT prep courses, but also allows high school students to connect with college students.

Would you use Unigo to narrow-down your list of colleges you want to attend? Tell us in the comments.

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